If we were to look at the matter in a rather more thorough and scientific manner, there can be no doubt that the previsions of Tarde would be justified, and that men would fall into certain natural anthropologic groups, according to their habitual modes of feeling and thinking and acting, the nature of each person, to some extent, "subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand." In each class there would be different degrees in sensory perception, in cranial shape and size, in muscular development. Such investigations will no doubt be systematically carried out in time. At present, owing to the extraordinary apathy of anthropologists, and consequently the general indifference to the importance of studies connected with the development and varieties of men, scarcely anything is known regarding the matter.
But important as professional selection is, it cannot account for everything. Indeed no serious attempt has been made to substantiate it by reference to the details of criminal anthropology. M. Tarde is a magistrate; no scientific man would have attempted to account for all the facts that have now accumulated by professional selection and acquired habits.
It is interesting to note that Topinard, the distinguished anthropologist, who has bestowed some severe and not unmerited criticism on portions of Lombroso's work,[86] while accepting the professional theory of crime, by no means considers that it is sufficient to explain the whole of the facts; remembering the teaching of Lélut and Baillarger, under whom he had studied mental disease, he calls in the aid of the morbid element:--"Criminals constitute a special professional category in society, in the same way as men of letters, men of science, artists, priests, the labouring classes, etc., but a complex category in which the most diverse elements enter: the insane or those predisposed to insanity, epileptics and those predisposed to epilepsy, the alcoholic, the microcephalic, the macrocephalic, those predisposed by some vice of organisation or of development, anterior or posterior to birth, betraying itself sometimes by very evident anatomical anomalies, those who are predisposed by family traditions and inclinations, those whose moral instincts are perverted by individual education and social environment, and finally those who are criminals by accident, without preparation or predisposition."[87] Professional characters will carry us a long way when we are seeking to account for natural social groups. But in the anti-social groups another and more morbid element enters. It is indeed largely the presence of morbid elements which gives these groups their anti-social character.